The latest disclosures of this activity mirror efforts by the Obama administration to send taxpayer funds to Israeli organizations that opposed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the country’s last election.

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A group of leading senators is calling on newly installed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to immediately launch an investigation into efforts by the Obama administration to sway foreign elections by sending taxpayer funds to “extreme and sometimes violent political activists” that promote leftist causes, according to a copy of the letter.

The lawmakers disclosed multiple conversations with foreign diplomats who outlined active political meddling by the Obama administration’s State Department, including the use of taxpayer funds to support leftist causes in Macedonia, Albania, Latin America, and Africa.

A portion of this State Department funding appears to have gone to organizations supported by the controversial liberal billionaire George Soros, according to the letter, which was authored by Republican Sens. Mike Lee (Utah), Jim Inhofe (Okla.), Thom Tillis (N.C.), Ted Cruz (Texas), David Perdue (Ga.), and Bill Cassidy (La.).

The senators are asking Tillerson to launch a full-scale investigation into these funding efforts in order to determine how exactly the Obama administration sought to promote left-leaning causes and political parties across the globe.

The latest disclosures of this activity mirror efforts by the Obama administration to send taxpayer funds to Israeli organizations that opposed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the country’s last election.

Political leaders from a range of nations spent months informing the lawmakers about these activities.

“Over the past few months, elected officials and political leaders of foreign nations have been coming to me with disappointing news and reports of U.S. activity in their respective countries,” Lee said in a statement. “This includes reports of diplomats playing political favorites, USAID funds supporting extreme and sometimes violent political activists, and the U.S. government working to marginalize the moderates and conservatives in leadership roles.”

“This sort of political favoritism from our missions around the world is unacceptable and endangers our bilateral relationships,” he said.

The senators are seeking an investigation that would review “all funds associated with promoting democracy and governance and review the programs, accounts, and multiplicity of U.S. entities involved in such activities.”

Such an investigation could shed light on the distribution of taxpayer funds to organizations and causes meant to instigate left-leaning political change abroad.

The letter insists that Tillerson should “review how all our tax dollars are being utilized in order to halt activities that are fomenting political unrest, disrespecting national sovereignty and civil society, and ultimately undermine our attempts to build beneficial international relationships.”

The lawmakers outline specific evidence of political meddling.

“We have received credible reports that, over the past few years, the U.S. Mission there has actively intervened in the party politics of Macedonia, as well as in the shaping of its media environment and civil society, often favoring left-leaning political groups over others,” they wrote.

This activity was pushed by USAID and groups associated with Soros’ Open Society Foundations, according to the lawmakers.

The organizations are said to have pushed a “progressive agenda” meant to “invigorate the political left” using taxpayer funds, according the letter.

“Respected leaders from Albania have made similar claims of U.S. diplomats and Soros-backed organizations pushing for certain political outcomes in their country,” the lawmakers wrote.

“Time and again, foreign leaders visiting Washington have expressed concerns to us about how American taxpayer funds are being used counterproductively in their respective countries,” the lawmakers disclosed, referring to efforts undertaken in Latin America and Africa.

This type of interference in foreign countries must stop immediately, the lawmakers said.

The United States did not abandon Israel by its abstention from vetoing the UN Security Council resolution condemning settlements that was passed Friday, Dec. 23, 2016.

The one who abandoned Israel was US President Barack Obama – and not for the first time. During his eight years in office, Obama let Israel down at least three times on issues that jeopardized its security:

One of the first consequences of his 2011 “Arab Spring” initiative was the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak as Egyptian president and his direct promotion of the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover of power in Cairo.

Four years later, Obama turned his back on Israel to award Iran favored status. Iran was allowed to retain the infrastructure of its military nuclear program as well as continuing to develop ballistic missiles, with the help of an infusion of $250 billion in US and European sanctions relief.

The horror of the carnage in Syria overshadowed the fact that President Obama allowed Tehran to pump Revolutionary Guards forces into the country through Iraq in order to fight for the brutal Assad regime. The president made no effort to halt the influx of pro-Iranian Shiite groups, including the Lebanese Hizballah, into Syria, as though it was perfectly natural and his policies had nothing to do with bringing Israel’s arch-foes to its back door.

In 2015, too, when Obama tried to wash his hands of the Middle East at large, he opened the war for the Islamic State and its leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi to walk in and commandeer large swathes of Iraq and Syria virtually unopposed.

From those vantage points, the jihadists sent out a tentacle to Egyptian Sinai – close to another Israeli border.

Of late, the Obama has claimed he was not aware of ISIS’ potential for expansion, implying that US intelligence was at fault.

All the same, Obama never tired of emphasizing that he had done more than any US president before him to support Israel’s security, mainly in the form of advanced US weapons systems supplied for its defense. Because of the close military and intelligence ties between the two countries, no voice was raised to contradict him.

It is now time to point to the hypocrisy of the incumbent president’s posture: Had he invested less in granting benefits and free rein to the Jewish state’s closest enemies, Israel would perhaps have been less dependent on American hardware.

In the latest UN Security Council resolution, Israel is reprimanded on the score that “all Israeli settlement activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including east Jerusalem, are illegal under international law and constitute a major obstacle to the achievement of peace on the basis of the two-state solution.”

Before anyone else, Barack Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry are in a position to attest to the falseness of this equation.

On Nov. 25, 2009, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced that Israel would impose a 10-month freeze on construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem as a concession to ease the US peace initiative. Israel gave way further on its demand for direct negotiations, when Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas dug his heels in against meeting Israeli officials face to face. John Kerry was forced to engage in shuttle diplomacy.
Even after those concessions for peace, the Obama initiative fell flat when it came up against Palestinian resistance.

The departing US president seems determined to use his last weeks in office to teach the Israeli prime minister a painful lesson he won’t forget in a hurry after his White House exit on Jan. 20.

But he is getting it wrong one more time. The UN SC resolution will soon be reduced to a piece of paper. The Palestinians will wave it gladly in the face of the international community, but Israel won’t remove a single settlement or stop building new housing estates in Jerusalem. The Prime Minister’s Office made it clear that Israel is not bound by the resolution and rejects it.
The only concrete result will be to make peace more elusive than ever

The notion that Donald Trump will come riding to Israel’s rescue as soon as he moves into the Oval Office is foolish. He was elected to rebuild America as a global power. That would necessarily include restoring US influence in the Middle East, but how he proposes to accomplish this is not generally known.

If he decides to call on Israel for support and assistance, it stands to reason that he will introduce radical changes in Obama’s steps – especially the nuclear deal with Iran and the peace process with the Palestinians.

Not all those changes can be achieved peacefully. They may well entail the use of military force by the United States and Israel. In this sense, Security Council Resolution 2334 may turn out to be the real obstacle to peace, tending rather to promote belligerence in the Middle East, because the Palestinians and other hardliners and rejectionists will use the resolution as their justification for bashing Israel and more acts of terror.

The Obama administration didn’t respond more forcefully to Russian hacking before the presidential election because they didn’t want to appear to be interfering in the election and they thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win and a potential cyber war with Russia wasn’t worth it, multiple high-level government officials told NBC News.

“They thought she was going to win, so they were willing to kick the can down the road,” said one U.S official familiar with the level of Russian hacking.

Again, let’s set aside everything else.

We have admissions by top government officials that they didn’t do anything about the hacking because they thought Hillary would win. If they thought Hillary would lose, as she did, they would have done something.

Their basis for responding to a threat isn’t national interest, but party interest.

Obama shrugged at Snowden. His former DOJ stooge, Eric Holder, claimed that the enemy traitor had performed a public service. But that was back when Russia was merely compromising national security secrets. And endangering national security meets with a shrug and a yawn from Obama.

If not, as from Eric Holder, with outright praise.

But suddenly it wasn’t our defense secrets that were being spilled. It was the Democratic Party’s dirty dealings. And all the outrage and anger that had lain slumbering while our national defense secrets were being plundered by the enemy was suddenly roused to a boiling pitch.

Obama has gone to the featherbed mattresses. This means war.

Reports claim that the CIA is “is contemplating an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia in retaliation for alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election”.

The right time to launch such an “action” would have been after Snowden or after the theft of top national security secrets by China. The OPM database hack should have merited such a response. Instead the corrupt left-wing elites running this country only respond to threats to their political power.

The CIA wasn’t allowed to strike back when its operatives were endangered. But humiliating Hillary Clinton and John Podesta must not be allowed. National security is disposable. Dem security isn’t.

What’s being communicated here is that Dem officials function like a state within a state. Their concern isn’t for the country, it’s purely for the party.

If the Dems are endangered, then they might contemplate taking action. If the country is endangered, they don’t care.

The Left’s crusade against Republican presidential electors is kicking into high gear even as the CIA-attributed story that Russian hackers won the White House for Donald Trump is going up in flames.

There is still no evidence –at least none that has been made publicly available– that the Russian government or Russian-backed cyber militias hacked anything to help Trump win the election but that’s not halting the Left’s efforts to delegitimize his presidency before it even begins.

Against this backdrop, members of the Electoral College are preparing to gather this Monday in the 50 states and the District of Columbia to fulfill their constitutional duty. Adding to the drama, some electors are demanding intelligence briefings on the alleged hacking before they vote.

But sometimes not everyone on the Left gets the memo.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch yesterday undermined the Left’s post-election jihad against Trump by rejecting the proposition that the Russian government (or anyone) hacked into voting machines used in the recent election.

“We didn’t see any sort of technical interference that people had concerns about, in terms of voting machines and the like,” she said at an event hosted by Politico.

While community organizers across America whip their followers into a state of frenzy, stories are still being planted in the media by the Central Intelligence Agency or sources claiming to speak for the spy agency. Yet the CIA refuses to be held to account.

When federal lawmakers did their job this week and demanded proof of the Russian hacking allegations, intelligence agencies refused to show up to provide congressional testimony.

Most reasonable people would infer from this appallingly arrogant behavior by the CIA, which has long been home to left-wing Democrats and squishy moderate Republicans, that all this damning evidence we keep hearing about does not actually exist.

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) blasted “Intelligence Community directors” for their “intransigence in sharing intelligence with Congress [which] can enable the manipulation of intelligence for political purposes.”

Intelligence overseer Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) is hopping mad over the CIA’s obstructionism. It is “absolutely disgraceful,” he said, that the intelligence community is refusing to brief lawmakers about the alleged Russian hacking program while false information is being surreptitiously funneled to the media to discredit Donald Trump.

“There is no consensus opinion, and yet we find it in the New York Times and the Washington Post and yet the House Committee on Intelligence was told nothing about this,” King said.

“This violates all protocols and it’s almost as if people in the intelligence community are carrying out a disinformation campaign against the president-elect of the United States,” King said. He acknowledged it is possible that someone in Congress could also be leaking false information.

Obama White House press secretary Josh Earnest escalated the time-limited administration’s war of words against the incoming president.

Referring to Trump’s fabled July 27 press conference at which the media falsely reported the then-GOP candidate had invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton, Earnest said matter-of-factly Wednesday that Trump asked Russia to use cyberwarfare against Clinton.

“There’s ample evidence that was known long before the election and in most cases long before October about the Trump campaign and Russia — everything from the Republican nominee himself calling on Russia to hack his opponent,” Earnest said.

“It might be an indication that he was obviously aware and concluded, based on whatever facts or sources he had available to him, that Russia was involved and their involvement was having a negative impact on his opponent’s campaign.”

“That’s why he was encouraging them to keep doing it,” Earnest said.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose site released thousands of purported emails from senior Democrats during the recent election campaign, threw cold water on the Russian hacking conspiracy theory.

Assange told Sean Hannity yesterday, “Our source is not the Russian government.” He also said the information WikiLeaks received “has not come from a state party.”

What Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the House Intelligence Committee on Nov. 17 suggests Assange may be right.

“As far as the WikiLeaks connection [to Russian hackers is concerned] the evidence there is not as strong and we don’t have good insight into the sequencing of the releases or when the data may have been provided,” Clapper said. “We don’t have as good insight into that.”

Assange told Hannity WikiLeaks received almost nothing on Republicans. “We received about three pages of information to do with the RNC and Trump but it was already public somewhere else.”

Interestingly, Assange, who has been built up in the media to be some kind of radical anarchist, stood by America’s constitutionally prescribed system for choosing a president.

He said:

There’s a deliberate attempt this week to conflate a whole lot of different issues together. It seems to be as a desire, an extremely dangerous and foolish desire, to flip members of the U.S. Electoral College around into getting up John Kasich or Hillary Clinton on the 19th. It’s foolish because it won’t happen. It’s dangerous because the argument that it should happen can be used in four years’ time or eight years’ time for a sitting government that doesn’t want to hand over power and that’s a very dangerous thing. There’s [Hillary] Clinton-aligned PACs putting out ads with lots of celebrities trying to push these electors to do it.

Who’s doing all this conflating? President Obama, Assange suggested.

Hannity asked Assange if the president knows Russia isn’t behind the Democrat electronic document dump and is “purposefully” pushing a false narrative to delegitimize Trump. Assange replied, “yes … there is a deliberate effort to conflate” underway.

Hannity piled on the CIA, noting that “for over 10 years WikiLeaks has never been proven wrong, not one single time.”

The radio talk show host said the CIA pushed the lie that the coordinated military-style attack on U.S. assets in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012 arose out of a mere protest.

“The CIA advanced that false story that it was a spontaneous demonstration when we now know it was a terrorist attack. And they advanced it through the CIA in Langley,” Hannity said. “There were some people there that were playing politics at the CIA, advancing a false narrative, a story that we know is false.”

But facts are malleable things and reality is never an obstacle to the plans of the Left.

The fact that Trump never asked Russia to hack Hillary and the CIA apparently has nothing to back up its wild allegations is no reason for those who wish to overturn the recent verdict of the American people to back off.

Something called Electors Trust is claiming that somewhere between 20 and 30 Republican electors are considering not voting for Trump on Monday, the John Podesta-founded Center for American Progress Action Fund’s propaganda site ThinkProgress reports. Co-founded by radical Harvard law professor Larry Lessig, Electors Trust claims to provide “free and strictly confidential legal support to any elector who wishes to vote their conscience.”

In a dramatic come-from-behind victory, Trump won 306 of the 538 available elector slots on Nov. 8. Left-wingers want to peel off enough GOP electors to deprive Trump of the magic number 270 he needs to formally secure the presidency in the official Electoral College vote this Monday.

There is almost no chance this coup will succeed but even if the Electoral College were to reach a stalemate Trump would still be on track to become president. With each state’s delegation casting a single vote, the current Republican-dominated House of Representatives would elect a president. The current GOP-dominated Senate would elect a vice president with each senator casting a single vote.

Trump-haters could still try and throw a wrench in the works when the new Congress convenes in January. When Congress begins to officially count the electoral votes, they could apply pressure to lawmakers to contest those votes. But it’s a very hard slog. A written objection has to be made to the president of the Senate, that is, Vice President Joe Biden, and it has to be signed by at least one senator and one House member.

Both chambers then debate the objection separately. Debate is limited to two hours. Afterwards, both the Senate and the House of Representatives rejoin and both must agree to reject the electoral votes for them not to count.

Making matters more difficult for the Trump-blockers, Lessig’s estimate of having as many as 30 sympathetic Republican electors in his pocket is almost certainly a hallucination on his part that helps to create the false impression that his anti-democratic campaign is succeeding.

More responsible whip counts place the number of likely faithless electors in the single digits – enough for an interesting historical footnote but not enough to keep Trump out of the Oval Office.

In an email Lessig cited “three groups that I know of working with/supporting electors,” and said that his faithless electors’ estimate is “based on my confidence in the reports from these three groups.”

Lessig told Chuck Todd on MSNBC Tuesday that he shares the goal of groups like Hamilton Electors to convince at least 40 Republican electors to say they’re contemplating dumping Trump.

Lessig is just one of many mass hysteria-afflicted leftists trying to stop Trump from becoming president.

Some officeholders are demanding a congressional investigation of the supposed hacking saga. Others liken the cyber-conspiracy they fantasize to 9/11 and are demanding an independent blue-ribbon commission be created. Maybe Jesse Jackson Sr. will invite the United Nations to participate.

Up to 55 electors –54 of whom are Democrats– have reportedly called upon Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to authorize intelligence briefings on the alleged Russian cyberattacks before the Electoral College votes. California elector Christine Pelosi, daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is spearheading the effort.

Democrat activist Daniel Brezenoff is paying for full-page ads in newspapers across the country such as the Washington Post and Atlanta Journal-Constitution asking electors to “vote their conscience” and reject Trump, Politico reports.

Then there are the left-wingers who have been doxxing Republican electors.

“Liberal groups, including a new one called Make Democracy Matter, have disseminated the names and contact information of the electors and encouraged people to contact Republican electors and ask them to change their vote,” hippy rag Mother Jones reports. “And those messages are arriving to electors’ inboxes, voicemails, and homes by the thousands.”

So now at least we know where all the death threats Republican electors are receiving are coming from.

Left-wing activists call this kind of in-your-face harassment “accountability,” an Orwellian euphemism to be sure. Accountability actions focus on harassing and intimidating political enemies, disrupting their activities, and forcing them to waste resources dealing with activists’ provocations. It is a tactic of radical community organizers, open borders fanatics, and union goons. Taking a cue from Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse, they want to shut down, humiliate, and silence those who fail to genuflect before their policy agenda, or in this case, ignore the votes of the 63 million Americans in 3,084 of the nation’s 3,141 counties or county equivalents who chose Donald Trump for president.

Make Democracy Matter, by the way, shrieks on its homepage that “We can stop Trump from imposing his racist agenda on America … we can build systems and structures that protect people from harm and dismantle white supremacy.”

MoveOn plans to run a 30-second ad on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today featuring faithless Republican elector Christopher Suprun from the 30th congressional district in Texas.

“The CIA report is frightening,” Suprun says in the video even though as far as anyone knows he’s never seen the elusive report.

No doubt the Van Jones-founded Megaphone Strategies, a self-described “social justice media strategy firm” hired by parties unknown to turn Suprun into 2016’s Cindy Sheehan has helped put him in the media spotlight.

In a sanctimonious New York Times op-ed earlier this month, Suprun denounced Trump, saying, “He does not encourage civil discourse, but chooses to stoke fear and create outrage. This is unacceptable.”

After writing that “Mr. Trump lacks the foreign policy experience and demeanor needed to be commander in chief,” he repeats the proven lie that during the campaign Trump said “Russia should hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.” He adds, “This encouragement of an illegal act has troubled many members of Congress and troubles me.”

Suprun, by the way, is quite a piece of work. GotNews discovered he “joined and paid for cheating website Ashley Madison in 2012, using the same address registered to his 9/11 charity, while bankrupt, likely unemployed, and married with three young kids, after he and his working wife owed over $200,000 to multiple creditors.”

More than 35,000 people have signed a Change.org petition demanding Suprun “be removed” as an elector.

And then there are the famous college dropouts from Hollywood.

Something called Americans Take Action, apparently doing business as Unite for America, put together a celebrity-larded public service announcement to urge Republican electors to vote for somebody, anybody, other than Donald Trump on Dec. 19.

In the video we learn that idiot actors Martin Sheen, Debra Messing, Bob Odenkirk, James Cromwell, Noah Wyle, and singer Moby have suddenly become champions of the government-limiting U.S. Constitution.

“Our Founding Fathers built the Electoral College to safeguard the American people from the dangers of a demagogue, and to ensure that the presidency only goes to someone who is, ‘to an eminent degree, endowed with the requisite qualifications,’ ” Sheen solemnly intones in the video.

A somber Messing repeats Sheen’s words, “to an eminent degree.”

You get the picture.

It’s also been fascinating watching left-wingers embrace Founding Father Alexander Hamilton solely because he wrote Federalist No. 68 which explains the Electoral College and the qualifications of a president.

Because the Left’s narrative paints Trump as a rabid Russophile, these people who otherwise would use the Constitution as toilet paper are heeding Hamilton’s warning that foreign powers might seek to raise “a creature of their own” to the presidency.

And they scream bloody murder about Holy Mother Russia, a country they were only too happy to serve in the days of the Soviet Union when Russian President Vladimir Putin was a colonel in the KGB.

After the Orlando attack, Obama ranted that it did not matter what we called Islamic terrorism. “What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIS less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.”

The “Islamic terrorists by any other name would smell as sweet” argument is the last resort of the losing side. It dismisses the whole issue as a matter of semantics with no bearing on the real world.

And that’s a neat rhetorical trick for the political side that relentlessly refuses to acknowledge reality.

One of the more shocking moments in Jeffrey Goldberg’s extended Atlantic write-up of Obama’s foreign policy came with his conversation with the Prime Minister of Australia. Obama, who has refused to recognize any connection between Islamic theology and violence, and made the hijab into a civil rights issue, told the Australian leader how he had seen Indonesia turn to “fundamentalist” Islam and noted, unfavorably, the large numbers of women now wearing hijabs as a sign of that fundamentalism.

Obama blamed the Saudis for pushing Wahhabism through imams and madrassas into Indonesia.

It wasn’t an original critique, but also not one that you hear much in Obama’s circles. When Obama reportedly tells world leaders that there will be “no comprehensive solution to Islamist terrorism until Islam reconciles itself to modernity” and undergoes reforms the way that Christianity did, it’s like suddenly having Khrushchev explain why Communism can’t work and will end up falling apart.

It’s shocking and revealing.

In moments like these we see that Obama knows that he’s lying. And Obama makes the awkward semantics argument because he knows that the existence of Islamic terrorism can’t be debated. When you are reduced to arguing that names don’t matter, it’s because you know that the name is right.

Plenty of leftists lie to themselves about Islamic terrorism. Obama is not lying to himself. He’s lying to us. He is willing to say things about Islamic terror to foreign leaders that he refuses to say to Americans.

He can tell them that Islamic terrorism is real and that the only way to stop it is to reform Islam.

And here is where we come back to his question of why naming Islamic terrorism matters. It’s a question that Obama has already answered. You can’t solve a problem until you define it. It may not matter what you call a rose, as long as you know that it’s a plant. If you don’t know that a rose is a flowering plant that grows out of the ground, then you’ll never figure out how to plant one. If you don’t know that Islamic terrorism is a theological implementation of its core religious identity, you won’t even know what it is you are supposed to be fighting. And you won’t win except through brute force.

We have never defined the problem of Islamic terrorism because that would just be too dangerous.

Why is Obama willing to talk about Saudi support for terrorism to the Prime Minister of Australia, but not to Americans? Why does he only suggest reforming Islam to foreign leaders in private?

The official story is that it would “empower” Islamic terrorists, but that’s a nonsensical claim. ISIS doesn’t derive its legitimacy from whether we call it ISIS, ISIL or Daesh. Nor are Muslims going to determine the theological legitimacy of a Jihadist group based on whether we refer to it as Islamic.

Telling the truth would no doubt “offend” Muslims. And the threat of offending Muslims continues to occupy far more branches of our government than fighting Muslim terrorism.

But Obama isn’t really afraid of offending Muslims. If he were, he wouldn’t have provided this little peek into his private meetings at all. Obama isn’t afraid of Muslims, terrorists or otherwise, he’s afraid of Americans.

Tell the truth and Americans might suddenly get the naughty idea that instead of waiting for Islam to “reform”, they ought to just deal with the problem at its source with a travel ban. They might decide that extra scrutiny for mosques really is warranted and that airport profiling would save everyone grief.

And, worst of all, they might realize that they have no reason to feel guilty about our foreign policy. If Islamic terrorism exists and is caused by Islam, then America isn’t and was never the problem.

That kind of thinking frightens Obama and the left far more than a hundred Orlando terror attacks.

Name the enemy and Americans might suddenly start feeling good about themselves. That outraged confidence which we associate with Pearl Harbor, but that made a brief return after September 11, might come back to stay. Americans would embrace patriotism and pride without doubt or guilt.

That is why Islamic terrorism can’t and won’t be named.

Whatever dislike Obama may harbor for the Islamization of Indonesia, he appears to be far less concerned by it than by the Americanization of America. He may indeed recognize Islamic terrorism to be a threat of some degree, but he views American patriotism as a much bigger threat.

He can give enlightened Atlantic readers a small peek behind the scenes to show them that he recognizes the obvious problem, but he isn’t about to extend that confidence nationwide.

And it’s not just Obama.

The real reason that our leaders won’t name the enemy is that they don’t like us and they don’t trust us. Running through their heads are nightmare scenarios like Brexit and Trump. They see their job as shepherding us away from our “worst impulses” toward a proper role within the global community.

They are quite capable of recognizing Islamic terrorism for what it is. They may not be terribly bright, but people in their positions have more than enough access to information for the conclusions to be inescapable. But they are determined not to allow Islamic terrorism to disrupt their larger plans for us.

It isn’t another 9/11 or 7/7 that worries them, but a resurgence of nationalism in response to it. That is why they will lie, mislead and even criminalize any dissent. Their response to every Islamic terrorist attack is to make us feel responsible, ashamed and helpless by transforming Muslims into the victims.

For these same reasons they will push mass Muslim migration no matter what the terror risks are. They will champion the hijab, even though they know it harms Muslim women. Why? Because these policies undermine our values and transform our countries. And that is their overriding agenda above all else.

That is what we are up against.

They know that they are lying about Islamic terrorism. It’s why Obama dismisses the subject as mere semantics. But it’s only one of many things that they are lying to us about. Obama lies to us about Islamic terrorism for the same reason that he lies to us about being able to keep your doctor.

He knows the truth, but the truth would interfere with the left’s larger plans to transform America.

When Obama claims, as he did on Tuesday, that “there’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ If someone seriously thinks we don’t know who we’re fighting, if there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists we’ve taken off the battlefield,” he is simply dissembling. You cannot know an enemy when you prohibit your law enforcement and intelligence personnel from studying or even mentioning them.

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There is a deep and unacknowledged irony to the fact that U.S. President Barack Obama, of all people, has opined in the days since the terror attack in Orlando that how you term things makes no difference.

“What exactly would using this label [‘radical Islam’] accomplish? … Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction,” Obama said on Tuesday in response to the heavy criticism poured on him after he, once more, refused to use the term in connection with the mass shooting. Islamic State quickly claimed responsibility for the attack, perhaps frustrated that no one in the U.S. administration, nor the Democratic presidential candidate, will give it credit for it.

Positing that calling something or someone a particular name makes no difference is the very epitome of hypocritical dissembling, especially coming from the person at the very top of the Democratic echelons.

These are the same people who for decades fought to entrench political correctness into American society, making it impossible to call certain things by their rightful names without facing a barrage of vilification and personal smears. The American Left has fought ceaselessly to shape language according to its ideas and has succeeded so tremendously that Americans are now afraid to report suspicious activity out of fear of coming across as “Islamophobic.” This has already cost lives. Before the attack, the security company that Omar Mateen worked for was afraid of reporting him, despite his suspicious behavior, exactly because it feared being castigated as “Islamophobic.”

The U.S. has much to learn from Israel in this regard. Israel is so efficient at fighting terrorism precisely because it cannot afford the luxury of integrating political correctness into its security doctrines. The very idea is preposterous. Nevertheless, this is exactly what Obama has done.

Five years ago, Obama erased all references to Islam in the educational materials used to train the American law enforcement and national security communities. In 2011, U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole confirmed that the Obama administration was recalling all its training materials to eliminate references to Islam that some Muslim groups had claimed were offensive.

In 2013, The Washington Times also reported that countless experts on Islamic terrorism had been banned from speaking to any U.S. government counterterrorism conferences, including those of the FBI and CIA. Government agencies were instead ordered to invite Muslim Brotherhood front groups.

If it is only a matter of labels, then why has Obama endangered American lives by deliberately blindsiding law enforcement and national security communities on the nature of Islamic terrorism? How are they supposed to grapple with the urgent issue of jihad if they are prohibited from learning about the nature of jihad?

When Obama claims, as he did on Tuesday, that “there’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ If someone seriously thinks we don’t know who we’re fighting, if there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists we’ve taken off the battlefield,” he is simply dissembling. You cannot know an enemy when you prohibit your law enforcement and intelligence personnel from studying or even mentioning them.

These are all relevant questions that the mainstream media has consistently refused to ask the administration — instead, dangerously dismissing them as conspiracy theories. The price is now being paid by innocent Americans, from a Christmas party in San Bernardino to a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Words matter tremendously, and you cannot fight an enemy that you are forbidden to name. Imagine Churchill telling the British that there was “no magic” in calling out the Nazi ideology and prohibiting his intelligence community from studying Nazi Germany’s strategy and tactics.

Hillary Clinton, feeling the backlash after publishing identical statements to those of Obama, has now opportunistically declared that she is ready to say those “magical words.”

But this is meaningless pandering, especially when you know she was part of the administration that purged training materials of all things Islam.

“In my perspective, it matters what we do, not what we say,” Clinton said. “To me, radical jihadism, radical Islamism, I think they mean the same thing. I’m happy to say either, but that’s not the point.”

The administration pretends there is no Islamist threat. This is what it has firmly projected to its law enforcement and intelligence communities, and Clinton is of course fully aware of the intricate details of this fact. Stating that it matters “what we do” then becomes an empty and even dangerous statement, because it deludes Americans into believing that there is a solid and credible intelligence effort underway to prevent future Islamist terror attacks in the United States, when this cannot logically be the case given that the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities are not allowed to study jihad or Islamic extremism.

Judging by his approach to complex national and international issues, U.S. President Barack Obama is very frustrated. The frustration is natural for someone who made big promises, almost messianic ones, and is now leaving behind nothing more than a trail of shattered dreams. During his eight years in office, the United States has gone from being a leading superpower, a pillar of Western civilization, to a state that is hesitant, indecisive and alarmingly slow to respond. Its domestic economy is faltering, sowing uncertainty and insecurity among the large middle class.

Needless to say, the success enjoyed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is an expression of a great number of Americans who grew up hearing about how their flag was raised on Japan’s Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima toward the end of World War II, and who are now watching with heartache as their beloved flag is being lowered to half-mast before being taken down altogether.

In an effort to gather up the pieces of his crumbling legacy, Obama set out on his final trip to the Middle East and Europe. America’s long-time allies feel betrayed. Their resentment is clear. Relationships between countries are not disposable. The Obama administration’s deference to Iran has had major implications on its ties with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. A divided Egypt is still paying the price for Obama’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood.

The state of Israel, which has led the struggle against a nuclear Iran for a long time, has by now come to terms with the fact that the United States was duped by the fake smiles of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and his friends in Tehran. Singing Passover songs in Hebrew won’t change the fact that Obama has not changed, after having sided entirely with the mendacious Palestinian narrative of victimhood.

Leaders in the Middle East cannot decide whether Obama is a naive president or one who is willing to sacrifice his fundamental values and his credibility just so he can leave behind what he sees as a positive sentence in the books of history — a sentence that will be erased with record speed.

Europe is also discouraged by the United States. Obama’s indecisiveness regarding the madness in Syria has allowed Russia to take significant steps in the Middle East and Europe. The failed efforts to confront the Syrian problem have contributed to the tsunami of migrants flooding Europe and all the resulting consequences for European society and its security. Add to this, of course, the financial crisis currently threatening to destroy the European Union, the seeds of which were sown in 1992 with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.

It is against this backdrop that the British are expected to decide via referendum whether or not to remain a part of the European Union. During his recent visit to England, Obama spoke out strongly against Britain’s potential separation from the EU. This was a crude and disproportionate effort to meddle in another state’s affairs — an expression of his desire to evade blame for the collapse of the European Union. In his mind, British citizens are expected to forgo their opinions and best interests in favor of his legacy.

It is therefore unclear why Obama unleashed his fury at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the latter made tireless efforts to convince Congress and the American public not be deceived by the dangerous nuclear deal. How much hypocrisy does it take to allow yourself to do things that you reprimand others for doing? Immanuel Kant saw this kind of behavior as a basic moral failure. Luckily for Britain’s citizens, Obama cannot veto their decision.